How to Love Illness in 4 Steps!

Life will not leave one stone unturned. It won’t. Life loves us too much not to. So whatever our issue is, life asks us to examine it from every angle and resolve it. Love asks us to do this for ourselves. That is why love is ruthless. It is ruthless for you. It won’t ever give up on you. In my opinion, illness is a version of getting this accomplished. Your illness will not give up on you until the wisdom is complete. I consider the entire point of living as an opportunity to claim ALL the parts of us with equal amounts of loving including illness. Super simple formula, quite challenging in action however. When we truly love the worst of ourselves with the same amount of love and compassion as the beautiful parts of ourselves, healing happens.

Here are some examples for you to get started doing this. And I will tell you from experience, when we give ourselves permission to do this kind of radical loving and acceptance, it can feel incredibly unsettling, scary, counter-intuitive, thrilling, ecstatic, beautiful and relieving. When you give yourself permission to love all of you, it will usher in transformation via cooperation and alignment.

the part of me that is so tired it just wants to lay down and not get up

the part of me that thinks that the way other people eat is wrong

the part of me that judges modern medicine and how it has failed me

the part of me that hates this diet and wishes could eat anything it wanted

the part of me that despises my sickness

That should get you started. Write as many as you want down. You don’t have to stop at 5. I do this every day, throughout my entire day. Some days I find 60 or 70 ‘ugly’ parts of me. Now I don’t see them as ugly. I see them as opportunities of more loving…my own personal and constant loving re-framing!

2. Sit in a quiet place and imagine a person you love very dearly. Get the feeling really clear inside of you. Feel the warmth in your heart as you think of them and how much you love them. See your heart swelling and filling with love for them

3. Keeping that feeling of loving inside your heart and body… imagine one of the parts of you on your list that you dislike. Using your imagination, conjure up what she or he looks like. Imagine them sitting next to you. They can be any age, wearing any outfit..but get a really clear picture in your imagination about them filled with the feeling of what you dislike. As clearly as you can, see them sitting next to you.

4. Using that feeling of love inside your body I want you to hold their hand, put your arm around them or imagine hugging them. Tell that part of yourself that represents what you dislike the most that you love it. It might seem challenging, but try to stay with it. It may feel weird or hard, but see if you can sit with that image of yourself and feel your heart fill up with compassion for the image sitting next to you. It may go something like this:

“Hello part of me that despises being sick. I am so glad you took a chance and sat with me here for a moment. I want you to know that I love you. And I will never leave you. And you never have to be alone again. And you aren’t doing anything wrong. And I really, really love and appreciate how hard you have been working on my behalf. I wanted to tell you I love you”.

Then imagine giving that part of yourself a loving embrace, and I thank it. I do this multiple times a day usually for about 15-20 seconds for each part of myself that need more love. Over time you will be able to do this almost instantly. For me it is daily practice and I do this constantly. This exercise puts me directly into cooperating with what is.

Then I let go and get on with my day. It is pretty straightforward. The hardest part is giving ourselves permission to love the ugliest parts of us. But this is the crux of The Loving Diet. Over time, what I dislike about myself changes, so I tend to have plenty to love :-). Medicine and society tell us that the ‘ugly’ parts of ourselves need to be changed and fixed. And you change them by being positive, strong, determined and willful. I am suggesting those part don’t need fixing. They just need your loving. From that perspective you were never broken. From that perspective, you are remembering your wholeness. From that perspective all the parts you dislike about yourself are valuable because they got you to more loving for yourself. I love win-wins. Never off track. Never alone. Illness is your grace in disguise. If you choose it.

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Written By

Jessica

Jessica Flanigan is a clinical nutritionist, author and spiritual coach. She has developed many mind-body techniques for those with chronic disease to develop a different relationship with their circumstances and find healing.

This is so timely for me. I needed to hear this today. I feel I have the diet aspect nailed down with the AIP, but the other lifestyle parts are what I need to work on now. Thank you for these ideas. Learning to love all of myself will help with stress reduction, I’m sure. Stress is my biggest struggle. Thanks again.

Jessica, this is beautiful. I will start this today. I put intention toward this most every day, without a lot of clarity. I can see that the super clear steps you offer will help me SO MUCH. I still love your podcasts so much.

BTW, I can’t remember if I told you I have been creating a blog about unplugging once a day. I finally published my first post yesterday 🙂 I’ve been developing my blog since last spring. Yay for tiny/big steps.

Thank u soo very, very much! For CREATING these Beautiful IDEAS. IF IT WASN’T FOR U I WOULDN’T HAVE THAUGHT OF IT. To except my Illness. And to love the parts of my body that has caused me to b soo ? that I have suffered and have been secluded from people cause of being sick. I JUST CRIED MY HEART OUT RIGHT NOW. And felt sorry for my body part that has been sick. Thank u!!! I will do everything different from here on.b cause now i know better. I will do better. Ilona

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